Hour 2 | 4000 - 1700 BCE

Episodes
Written By Alyssa Alarcon Santo

“The Five Cradles of Civilization” · Sumer and Akkad in Mesopotamia · Writing Systems · Hammurabi’s Code · Norte Chico/Caral · Ancient Egypt · How to “Unite” a Land · Indus Valley/Harappa · Xia Dynasty · Origins of Dynastic China · What is a Civilization?

The main sources we relied on to make this episode. Plus fun extras - ancient recipes, games, music and more!

SYNOPSIS

Note: We’ve added links throughout the SYNOPSIS which are not our official sources. We’ve linked pictures, maps, encyclopedia entries, etc for you to enjoy if you want to see the things we are discussing, or get a quick reminder of people, time periods, concepts etc (what is an australopithecine again??). For our official sources check out the BOOKS, ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS, and LECTURE tabs.

This second episode begins in this new “Bronze Age.” However the use of bronze was not the only seismic shift in human history occurring at this time, massive civilizations were coalescing and beginning to write, recording their own history, as well as literature, songs, laws and tax codes. Wide spread slavery and warfare emerge, defining life for many people in these cities. This episode will cover what history classes refer to as the “Five Cradles of Civilization.”  Although we will dismantle each word in this phrase, we will borrow its framework to talk about the early civilizations in Mesopotamia, Peru, India, Egypt, and China.

Mesopotamia or the land “between the rivers.” 

Norte Chico or Caral Civilization

Egypt

Indus Valley or Harappan Civilization

Northern China along the Yellow River

BOOKS
ARTICLES

Journal of Archeological Research, “Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization”

Why do we assume we will find priests and kings?

Note: There are very few books written about the Norte Chico/Caral Civilization— this unfortunately means many of my sources are behind academic paywalls.

American Journal of Biological Anthropology, The diet at the onset of the Andean Civilization: New stable isotope data from Caral and Áspero, North-Central Coast of Peru

Nature, Dating the Late Archaic occupation of the Norte Chico region in Peru

Preceramic Civilization in Coastal Peru: Revolutionary Data, Pioneering Interpretations

INTERVIEWS/LECTURES

Irving Finkel, “Cracking Ancient Codes: Cuneiform Writing”

How do we figure out ancient writing systems? One of the world’s experts explains. Also he’s hilarious - I highly recommend.

Tides of History, “What was the Indus Valley Civilization? Interview with Dr. Adam Green”

“Dr. Adam Green of Cambridge University joins [Patrick Wyman] to explain the unusual way in which the Indus Civilization was organized, its lack of powerful elites, and how and why it eventually fell apart.”

Ted Talk, “A Rosetta Stone for the Indus script - Rajesh Rao

Trying to crack the code of a writing system without a Rosetta Stone.

OTHER

Sacred City of Caral-Supe (UNESCO

The Avalon Project : Code of Hammurabi

Text of the law code, translated by L. W. King

The Inscription at Bisotun

The Behistun Inscription, the "Rosetta Stone" of Cuneiform Script 

Ancient Games

Royal Game of Ur

Sumer Proverbs

  • (Edited slightly for clarity)

    Charlie: Welcome back to World History 24, where my older sister Ellie teaches me world history in order in just 24 hours. My name is Charlie. In our last episode, we covered the complicated story of early human evolution, from the first stone tool using hominins to what we are today, sapiens. By the end of the episode, humans survived all the other members of our genus. Some began to use copper tools, some began to play with the cultivation and domestication of food and animals, and some created settlements that lasted thousands of years. 


    This second episode will cover from 4000 to 1700 BCE, often referred to simply as “the Bronze Age.” However, the use of bronze was not universal, nor was it the only seismic shift in human history occurring at this time. Massive civilizations were coalescing and beginning to write their own history, literature, songs, laws, and tax codes, and many people's lives were defined by slavery and warfare. This episode will examine five of these early civilizations in modern-day Iraq, Peru, India, Egypt, and China, what history classes refer to as the five cradles of civilization. Although we will have to dismantle each word in this phrase, we will borrow its framework and spend ten minutes zooming through them, discussing food, art, monuments, language, government, and more along the way. After visiting these five cradles between 4000 and 1700 BCE, we will hopefully have a more contextualized sense of the word civilization. 


    So without further ado, let's call Ellie and continue the magnificent story of human history.


    Charlie: So set the stage for us in our overarching series here. What times are we going to be covering this hour? 


    Ellie: So in this hour, we're going to pick up right where we left off last time, and we're going to start at around 4000 BCE and take us through 1700 BCE. So the mind-boggling thing that happens right now in the course of human evolution, which as we saw last episode has been going on for millions of years and certainly for hundreds of thousands, even if you're only talking about Homo Sapiens, is that right in this tiny window of a couple thousand years, civilization springs up in multiple places across the planet almost simultaneously. 


    Charlie: Right. Places that we assume have no contact with each other as well. 


    Ellie: We assume they have no contact with each other, yeah. And so we're going to talk about each one of those five places. And so we'll talk about sort of 3000, 2000 BCE, but we'll understand that people have been living in these places for longer. So again, we're going to take us kind of out of that murky history that's hard to date and end us in 1700 BCE.


    So in a history book, or in an archaeology book, this phrase is used a lot, these “five cradles of civilization,” which means these five places where civilization sprung up separately. Having said that, each one of the words, ‘five,’ ‘cradle,’ and ‘civilization,’ are slightly misleading or slightly problematic. So we're going to use that framework because that's the framework that would be used in a history book, but I just want to quickly address why it's kind of a strange framework. 


    Charlie: Sure. 


    Ellie: So just quickly in reverse order, like ‘five cradles of civilization.’ So starting with the word ‘civilization,’ we talked a lot about that last episode and that word has very problematic origins. And it's also just not a very useful word because the difference between what a civilization is and what it isn't is very gray. And there's a lot of exceptions and it has way too many implications that sound like better than, and that is not remotely helpful. So in a lot of ways, what we mean is the five places where really complex societies, and mostly what we mean is big cities, began. So when we talk about civilization, that's largely what we mean is large complicated cities.


    Charlie: Right


    Ellie: So ‘five cradles of civilization.’ ‘Cradle’ being the next one we'll address. So what cradle means in this context is that the society grew without learning from the people around it exactly. Like they say that civilization emerged there spontaneously. So you can imagine that you might be a hunter gatherer people or a semi-nomadic people, and then a city comes and conquers you. And then all of a sudden you're living with all the trappings of a city. That's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is places in which a city emerged, a civilization emerged rather than learning from somebody else or having it forced on them.


    Charlie: Okay, that makes sense.


    Ellie: And interestingly, that's only happened a few times across the earth. Having said that, I don't really know how they can know for sure that Egypt and Mesopotamia weren't learning from each other, for example. They were not that far and we know they were trading constantly. So just the idea that anything could be a cradle to me is like a little bit confusing. And then the last word is ‘five.’ And in fact, the phrase is usually the six cradles of civilization because the Olmecs are usually included in this and the Olmecs are from Mesoamerica. However, their civilization emerges a little bit later. So we're actually going to talk about them in a later episode, but either way, the idea that civilization only grew organically five times is just, I just like, don't really know how we can be totally sure of that. And so just hold all of these words lightly. And just we're using this framework; this is the framework that historians and archaeologists use to talk about this thing that happens now. And we're still, the implications of what happens at this time in history are still playing out. You know, something dramatically changes in these few thousand years and all of a sudden, people are living in ways that they've got kings, and they have cities, and they have writing, and they have bureaucracy, all these things that still dominate our lives to this day. And this kind of happens spontaneously in five different places across the earth at more or less the same time, which is mind-boggling to me. 


    Mesopotamia


    Charlie: All right. Let's, I guess let's jump into our first civilization then. Which one did you, which one do you want to start with? 


    Ellie: So we are going to start with the Sumarians and the Akkadians, which are in Mesopotamia. And Mesopotamia is in modern day Iraq and Mesopotamia means the land between the rivers. So ‘Meso’ between, and then ‘Potamia’ like ‘Hippopotamus’ means ‘river,’ so ‘between the rivers.’ 


    Charlie: Wow. I know. I'm gonna try to not have my mind too much, my mind blown too much about Hippopotamus, but okay. You learn something when you listen to World History 24. 


    Ellie: Exactly. You never know what you'll learn. So through this land of Mesopotamia flows the two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. And these two rivers flood regularly. They start up in the mountains, they build up all this stuff called silt. And that floods into the surrounding lands, when the water floods into the surrounding lands, that makes the land very fertile. So even though when you think of modern day Iraq, you may think of it as being a dry place, in the actual flood plains of these rivers, it's quite fertile. 


    Charlie: Okay. Got you. 


    Ellie: So people live in Mesopotamia for thousands and thousands of years, just like I'm gonna say for all of these. But sometime around 4500 BCE, they start to coalesce into these big cities. And these are the earliest cities in the world. And again, as we talked about with Catalhoyuk last time, it's like, what is a city exactly is a little bit nebulous, but anyway, there's these huge groups of people living in tight quarters. And they live in multi-story buildings. These buildings are all made out of mud bricks, because what do you have a lot of around the Tigris and Euphrates? Mud. So they would take them, form them into bricks, put them in the sun. And then, you know, you have these really strong clay bricks and you make your cities out of them. 


    Charlie: Okay, cool


    Ellie: All of Mesopotamia is dotted with these different cities. And these cities trade a lot with each other. And there's sort of a cohesive culture throughout all of Southern Mesopotamia. And those are the Sumerians. There's sort of a cohesive culture all through Northern Mesopotamia, that's the Akkadians. But in the most sweeping terms, the history of this time period is that this city will become sort of more powerful. Sometimes it will conquer a couple of the cities around it. And then a different one will. And roughly over time, the Sumerians are very, very powerful. And then they kind of lose power as the Akkadians rise. And in the time period that we're covering in this one episode, that's, in the most sweeping terms, the general narrative.


    So we have sort of classic Bronze Age life rolling along in these cities. They're crowded, vibrant places. Over time, there becomes significant hierarchy and class structure. Slavery becomes rampant. Like several of these cities make all their money become very wealthy, important, powerful places because, specifically, of their robust slave trade. You know, we have agriculture. Most calories are coming from agriculture. And because we have writing, which we'll circle back to in a minute, we literally have recipes, which I love because it's so personal and you can really picture their lives. We have a specialization of craftspeople, so there's sophisticated pottery, there's sophisticated toys and things, very day-to-day things. There's jewelry and we have poetry. And we have just all these things that people need time to engage with. There's lots and lots of monumental architecture, including and sort of most iconically, perhaps, these things called ziggurats, which are stepped pyramid temples. So they look like a giant building that's sort of shaped like a gigantic staircase, like a tower. And the idea is that you want literally physically to be closer to the gods, so they're very tall. Like many Bronze Age societies or current societies, religion and the government are entirely intertwined with each other. And so these temples and these ziggurats are very important politically. And the priests and priestesses frequently perform their duties on these ziggurats, like on platforms where the public can witness. 


    Charlie: Like out in front, kind of, or whatever. 


    Ellie: Yeah, yeah, up high still. But just, you know, publicly so that the people can, you know, witness the religious rites of the priests and priestesses.


    Voiceover Enheduanna:


    Charlie: Along the Euphrates River in the crowded Sumerian city of Ur was a ziggurat dedicated to the moon god. In 2200 BCE, the high priestess of this ziggurat was named Enheduanna, and she is the first ever named author. She writes of passion, violence, womanhood, and the nature of gods. It also features the oldest surviving use of the pronoun I. 


    "It was in your service that I first entered the Holy Temple. 

    I, Enheduanna, the highest priestess. 

    I carried the ritual basket, 

    I chanted your praise, now I've been cast out to the place of lepers. 

    Day comes and the brightness is hidden around me. 

    Shadows cover the light, drape it in sandstorms. 

    My beautiful mouth knows only confusion. 

    Even my sex is dust."


    As Ellie mentioned a minute ago, the history of Mesopotamia at this time is one of conflict between cities. Enheduanna's father, Sargon the Great, was the king of the city of Akkad, and during his reign he conquered many Mesopotamian city-states, creating one of the earliest empires on the earth. His reign is recorded on an important artifact called the Sumerian Kinglist, which are tablets that chronicle the rulers of ancient Mesopotamian cities. As Sargon the Great's empire grew, so did the unrest among the Sumerian cities that he conquered, especially when he changed their official language from Sumerian to Akkadian. Sargon appointed his daughter Enheduanna to her position of High Priestess in one of these Sumerian cities that he conquered called Ur. From her ziggurat there, she wrote many hymns and songs to the gods of both cultures, likely in an effort to help unite the divided peoples of Sumer and Akkad. 


    Ellie: Another big thing that they did was they had pretty sophisticated math, and their math relied on the number system that was in a base 60, the sexagesimal number system, as opposed to our number system, which is in the base 10. And because of that, still to this day, the fact that our number–, that our hours have 60 minutes in them, or that our minutes have 60 seconds, or like that a circle has 360 degrees in it, all of that is like the remnants of–, you know, like right now to this day, the way we divide our days up is because of the way the Sumerians counted, which is cool. 


    Charlie: Yeah, it is very cool. It's also a little frustrating. I wish we would do it by hundreds, but that's just me. 


    Ellie: Wow, no respect for the poor Sumerians.


    Charlie: No respect at all. Put some respect on the Sumerians' math. Sorry about that. How about written language as opposed to math?


    Ellie: Just very quickly, the way written languages tend to evolve is with early markings that usually mean numbers. So you might just have like a scratch mark that keeps track of like how many goats are mine and how many goats are yours. 


    Charlie: Kind of a logistical purpose at first. Yeah. 


    Ellie: Yeah, exactly. And then the symbols develop for very, very concrete nouns usually to label something. So this picture that I'm scratching onto the top of my jar means that this jar has honey in it and this one means it has oil in it. And maybe a different mark might mean that it's my name. So this is my jar of honey as opposed to your jar of oil. And then the writing just becomes more abstract over time. And it takes a long time for this to happen, like that for more–, less specific words to develop, even things like adjectives, but then it's an even bigger step removed to develop things like pronouns and whatnot. 


    You can see the evolution of the Sumerian writing. They scratched, they like etched using a sharp reed onto clay tablets in this writing that we call cuneiform. And you can see very early on like a triangle means ‘mountain.’ And then you go forward in time a little bit, and a triangle might mean ‘foreign,’ for example.


    Charlie: Like ‘from the mountain.’ Or… 


    Ellie: Exactly. And so that you see that evolution occur. And then the final leap that many languages make, although not all of them, is into an alphabet, where instead of having this increasingly complicated system of symbols where you just have to keep adding them, you just go all the way backwards and distill it down into sounds. And so a common word like the ‘mountain’ word that we used earlier, the symbol for mountain might then just become ‘M.’ So then ‘M’ is just the triangle instead of ‘M’ for mountain or ‘M’ for ‘foreign’ or whatever. 


    Ellie: So we have thousands of these clay cuneiform tablets documenting life in Mesopotamia, you know, in Sumer and Akkad, basically sitting untranslated in boxes in museums.


    Charlie: Untranslated because we can assume that they're mostly bureaucracy and not important or why are they untranslated? 


    Ellie: Well, interestingly, there is like a historian who said, because almost no one on the whole earth can read them. Most of them aren't even categorized, like much less translated. 


    Charlie: Because so few people can read cuneiform. 


    Ellie: Can read cuneiform. Yeah, it's a tiny, tiny number. Yeah. And so like, surely, yes, a lot of them are just bureaucratic, like pay-stubs and ‘you owe me sheep’ and whatever. But sure. Of the stuff that we've translated, there's also just all this great stuff. You know, we have poetry and we have recipes and we have literal drinking songs and we have just all these things that give you insight into just like actual human people's lives day to day, you know, the people that were actually living there, which is so great. There's all these proverbs and the proverbs sound like they could have been written last week. You know, they're just like people complaining about their marriage, people complaining about their bosses, you know, it's just very familiar. And then of course, also on these tablets, we have our very first literature. You know, the epic poem Gilgamesh is written in cuneiform. 


    Voiceover Gilgamesh: 

    Written on 11 cuneiform tablets, the Epic of Gilgamesh details the life of King Gilgamesh, who ruled a massive Sumerian city called Uruk. Gilgamesh's reign is documented on the Sumerian king list like Sargon, which means he's probably a real king but, like much of history, his story has been mythologized over time. One tablet of this epic contains a perhaps familiar flood story in which the gods plan to kill every living thing in a massive flood. A mortal man named Utnapishtim is warned of the incoming flood in a dream. So he loads every animal onto a gigantic boat, and together, they all survive the deluge. Utnapishtim releases three birds and when the third does not return, he knows it's found somewhere dry to land. He offers incense at the mountain Ziggurat in gratitude to the gods, repairing the relationship between humans and the divine. On another tablet of his epic, Gilgamesh leaves his city and meets a man who is born in the wilderness. They fight for seven days and then ultimately become friends. This relationship between King Gilgamesh and this “wild man” is an ancient version of the urban versus rural dichotomy, which you can imagine was an increasingly important theme as cities began to dominate parts of the world. 


    Ellie: Certainly over the course of Sumerian history and over the course of like all history, there's lots of writing about the the people that live in the hills, you know, and basically every language on the earth, as far as I can tell from doing my research for this, has some word that means ‘barbarian,’ you know, that means like, ‘the people that aren't us that are less sophisticated than us and are a threat to us.


    Charlie: Yeah. 


    Ellie: So there's a lot of like that type of language appearing at this time. There's like becomes this sort of division between the city dwellers as being like ‘us, the sophisticated ones who like know about the gods and like can live properly, and then the other that like is lurking in the mountains, you know, ready to get us.’ And in fairness, like they were lurking in the mountains and did get them lots of times. I mean, you know, for what that's worth. 


    Charlie: So coming to the end of our 10 minutes here on Mesopotamia, anything else to mention before we go? 


    Ellie: Yes. So there's one one last thing that I want to cover quickly. And that is the the earliest version of the Babylonian Empire. And that is when one Southern Mesopotamian city along the Euphrates, Babylon, takes over an enormous swath of Sumer - of Southern Mesopotamia, and establishes an empire under this King Hammurabi. 


    Charlie: Okay, I feel like I know Hammurabi's code or something. 


    Ellie: Yes, exactly. Exactly. 


    Charlie: I don't know what it says.


    Ellie: So his law code, his law code, the code of Hammurabi is very famous. There are sort of different versions of it in various cities, but the language of Hammurabi's code is very, very familiar if you've read the law code in the Hebrew Bible. It's, you know, clear that this kind of law code was standard or becoming standard throughout the land. So it establishes the right of the king to rule, like it says, "God said, I can." But then it tells the king that they need to protect the orphan and the widow the way a shepherd protects his flock. So that again, you know, that language rings very familiar to me. But it's importantly the law code that we get the language, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” from. So this is in contrast to earlier Mesopotamian law codes, specifically from this law code from the city of Ur, which says specifically, "If a man knocked out the eye of another man, he shall weigh out half a mina of silver," or, "If a man knocked out the teeth of another man, he shall pay two shekels of silver." 


    Charlie: Hmm. So you can like literally pay with currency for crimes. Where Hammurabi is like, it's an eye for an eye. 


    Ellie: Yeah, exactly. So it's a pretty big change, really. And the Babylonian empire in several episodes will be incredibly important. And this is just the very earliest version of it. And obviously we're barely touching on it. But Hammurabi's code is an important, you know, sort of early law code that establishes a lot throughout this whole part of the world.


    Norte Chico 


    Charlie: All right. Wrapping up Mesopotamia and Babylon. Where do we head to next?


    Ellie: So now we're going to move way across the world and we're going to move to a civilization that relies a lot on cotton and we're going to move to a civilization that builds pyramids and is a long river that runs through deserts and it isn't Egypt. 


    Charlie: What! Shook.


    Ellie: Yeah, exactly. It's in fact Peru.


    Charlie: Okay, cool. Very surprising.


    Ellie: So in Peru, the Andes Mountains run down along the coast. There's a gap though between the mountains and the actual ocean. And that gap is a pretty intense desert. However, there's rivers that run out of the mountains and flow down into the ocean. And so it runs through this desert land, floods into the surrounding lands around it, making fertile farmland and along those rivers grow this pretty incredible civilization, which we call the Norte Chico or the Caral civilization.


    Charlie: Cool. And it's similar to Mesopotamia. It's a bunch of cities or is it just one big huge city?


    Ellie: No, it's a bunch of cities. And the first one we found and the one that's the most well preserved is called Caral, which is why, you know, which gave the whole civilization its name. But it isn't actually the biggest one. It's just the one that we know the most about. 


    Charlie: Okay. And yeah, what was life like there? What were they eating and farming and whatnot? 


    Ellie: So they are really fascinating civilization because in some ways they're totally unique compared to the early civilizations that we know about in AfroEurAsia. And one of the most interesting things about them is they are pre-ceramic. So they're the only big giant civilization we know about that came into existence before they had ceramic, before they had pottery. 


    Charlie: Wow. That's like hard to imagine for some reason, just like thinking of how useful ceramics are. Or would have been. 


    Ellie: It's really hard. Yeah, it's very hard to imagine. And, and just talking about their diet for a second, I don't know if this is part of the answer lies in their diet. So in these river floodplains, they were growing peppers, squash, avocados, peanuts, beans, small amounts of corn and potatoes. 


    Charlie: Yum.


    Ellie: I know it's like, I definitely, diet wise, they were the place to be, I think. But what's interesting about that list is that it doesn't include a large grain. And so they, you know, they had small amounts of corn and potatoes, especially at the end, but there wasn't like millet or wheat or rice or something that needed to be cooked into a porridge. And so they could, you know, they could roast their food. So there's some speculation among the archeologists that there wasn't the same sort of barrier in order to get calories from the food sources available. They had to invent ceramic so they could make a porridge. You know, there wasn't that same kind of barrier in Peru and the Norte Chico civilization. 


    Charlie: Yeah. Is it, I mean, what were like the homes and the cities like built from, if not like clay and... 


    Ellie: Well, they were built from clay bricks, interestingly, but they didn't have like fired pottery built on a wheel. Yeah, exactly. Having said that, they, they did grow a lot of squash and gourds, which of course preserve nicely into like a water carrying vessel or whatever. So it's not quite as, it can't do all the things that a ceramic pot could do, but it can do a lot of them. 


    Charlie: Okay. I got you. When you said ‘pre-ceramic,’ that refers to something specific in that it's like cooked in a kiln. 


    Ellie: Fired in a kiln so that it has all these specific properties to it.Sun baked clay is just more fragile. 


    Charlie: I see. And you said they're growing cotton? 


    Ellie: Yeah. So they were growing cotton. 


    Charlie: That's interesting. 


    Ellie: And yeah, the reason that's interesting is it's given rise to all these theories that maybe their cotton production was actually what allowed them to become a big civilization specifically that they could weave intricate fish nets, like huge fish nets out of them and then really access the resources of the ocean. And so for a long time, the theory was that the groups of people that lived upstream grew the cotton and the people that lived downstream right by the ocean would trade with them and gather all these marine resources. And that was how this civilization was basically able to feed itself without access to a big grain. That theory is more and more controversial now, so who knows, but definitely they did grow cotton. 


    I'll link to pictures of Caral on our website because it's really, really cool looking. But again, the cities are made of mud bricks and of course there's many homes in them, but there's also a fair amount of monumental architecture. There's mounds. There's also sunken round plazas which we don't really know what they're for. I heard this interview saying that archaeologists and historians just use the word ‘ritual’ when they don't know what they're talking about.


    Charlie: What somebody's for.


    Ellie: Yeah, exactly. So they're just like, “oh, they had ritualistic uses,” but does that mean religion or football? It's hard to say. But there is some speculation that it might have been for games because that's what societies in that area of the world in later times used those sunken round plazas for. So maybe this is the origin of that practice. There's also lots of evidence in these cities of sort of a rich abstract spiritual life. There's lots of instruments. There's flutes made from pelican and condor bones. There's little cornets made of deer and llama bones.


    Charlie: Dope.


    Ellie: Right? Totally. There's clay figurines, female figurines, and then there's lots of jewelry made from things like snail shells and coco seeds and semi-precious stones and stuff that aren't from the ecosystem right around the Norte Chico. So what that means, of course, is that there must have been some kind of extensive, robust trade –


    Charlie: A trade network.


    Ellie: – because these are coming from far, far away.


    Charlie: Cool.


    Ellie: Another really important thing that's there is our very first example of a kipu, which is these intricate knots on strings that are a record-keeping system in much later societies. And our very first example is like all the way back in the Norte Chico. 

    And then there's these big pyramids. The big pyramid in the main city that's been excavated, the base of it is four football fields. So, you know, big.


    Charlie: Oh my gosh. Every time I hear about the scale of pyramids, I'm just like, what?


    Ellie: Mind-boggling. Mind-boggling. And these are different than the pyramids you think of in Egypt, which are made with huge stones, and we don't understand how they were built. These were built with small stones and mortar. The reason that that's interesting, aside from just aesthetically they're different, and that's cool, is that the rocks were hauled to the site in these woven nets of reeds. And because the reeds are an organic material, they can be carbon-dated. 


    Charlie: So we know exactly how old they are.


    Ellie: We know exactly how old the pyramids are. Yeah. So they were built in 2600 BCE, which is very, very similar to when the Egyptian pyramids were built. And I don't know what was going on. 


    Charlie: sings x-files theme


    Ellie: I know because they're like on the opposite sides of the world. I mean, it's almost like a joke to be like, were there aliens or something? But why were people on two opposite ends of the earth building pyramids at the exact same time and not 10,000 years earlier? 


    Charlie: And not in communication. 


    Ellie: Not in communication with each other. It's just actually mind-boggling to me.


    Charlie: Coming to the wrap-up point for Peru here, any last things before we go? 


    Ellie: Well, so the final thing to say about the Norte Chico is just that they sort of vanished. Caral, which is the city that we know the most about, was abandoned between 2000 and 1600 BCE. And we don't fully understand why. There's not evidence that they were terribly violently taken over, for example, which usually you can see ‘cause the city was burned or there's bodies that were mutilated everywhere or whatever. We don't have evidence like that. So potentially climate change, potentially all–, maybe–, we don't know is the answer. 


    And so there was this giant complex civilization that lasted for a long, long time, built pyramids and then vanished. And we don't really know why.


    Voiceover Caral:


    Charlie: This feels like one of those moments that I've already had a number of times where I'm baffled or almost angry that I never learned about something. As Ellie said, the Caral civilization, or the Norte Chico, was massive. It had cities, pyramids, agriculture, trade, and a vibrant culture, all before 1700 BCE. And thinking back, it seems like these tenants were used to justify my education's focus on the civilizations of AfroEurAsia, but for some reason the Norte Chico was skipped. This feels doubly sad because the fact that this civilization emerged at the same time as the other four, but completely isolated from them, makes them all that much more amazing.


    Egypt 


    Charlie: Yeah. So moving on from that mysterious end of Caral, where do we head to next?


    Ellie: So we're going to move across the world back to our more familiar pyramids. And those, of course,

    are in Egypt. So Egypt, which is in... Well, it's in... It's in Egypt. And Egypt is in the

    pyramids. And those, of course, are in Egypt. So Egypt, which is in modern day Egypt...


    Charlie: Spoiler. 


    Ellie: Exactly. Unexpectedly. Anything you say about Egypt has to start with the Nile. So the Nile is this incredibly long river which starts much further south in Africa, and then famously flows south to north. And that's very unusual for a river to do all the way up to what is now modern day Egypt and what is the Egypt that we're talking about in this part of the podcast. What we think now basically is that during the Ice Age, the Sahara desert was pretty green. And the land around the Nile was kind of a swampy flooding mess. And then as the Ice Age ended and the desert dried up, the Nile River became more gentle and sort of over the course of that whole long, many thousand year period, people ended up moving and settling along the Nile. The Nile is one of these rivers that's very predictable and gently floods. So you can really use it for agriculture very well. It's not one of these rivers that's really turbulent and always flooding very unexpectedly. 


    Charlie: Okay. I see. 


    Ellie: What that means is that complex societies have grown up all along the Nile as farming takes off in this part of Africa. 


    Charlie: And ancient Egypt is on the far northern part of the Nile, which is something about the Upper... I'm remembering something from high school about Upper and Lower Egypt. 


    Ellie: Right. Because the Nile flows from south to north, Upper Egypt is south, is southern Egypt and Lower Egypt is northern Egypt. And those were two separate kingdoms. And then in a 3200 BCE, there's a king who sometimes is given the name Narmer and sometimes is given the name Menes and he is the king of Upper Egypt and he unites the two kingdoms. 


    Charlie: Okay. 


    Ellie: Now, what I want to say about this, because it's going to come up a lot of times in this podcast, is that words like ‘unite’ are words that do a lot of work historically. 


    Charlie: I see what you mean. Yeah.


    Ellie: Yeah. The picture that we have of King Menes uniting these two kingdoms, he's got the king of Lower Egypt by the hair. And on the back he's walking by a bunch of decapitated people. 


    Charlie: Nice. So just a real peaceful uniting of just... Yeah. I see what you're saying. 


    Ellie: Yeah. Exactly. I mean, it's always phrased that way: “King Menes united upper and lower Egypt!” and I had imagined that if you were living in lower Egypt, you would have felt more like you had been conquered or maybe you had been colonized than that you had been united. 


    Charlie: Right. Right.


    Ellie: So he was the king of upper Egypt initially. And in upper Egypt, they wear the crown that looks like a white bowling pin in northern or Lower Egypt. They wear a red, more just regular crown. And after he united these two, wore both. And that red and white crown is the crown that you see, like anytime you see anything having to do with ancient Egypt and the Pharaohs, they're wearing that crown all the way up until like Alexander the Great. So he starts this thing that goes on for the next 2,500 years. 


    Charlie: Yeah. I feel like I can picture like hieroglyphic drawings and things of that crown specifically of the two parts, you know.


    Ellie: Yeah, surly.  


    Charlie: And hieroglyphics like talking about their writing. Am I right? Hieroglyphs, is that–?


    Ellie: Yeah, that's exactly right. So they sort of famously wrote in hieroglyphs that I imagine many people can picture. They've seen them in a museum or something. And what's true is that almost immediately that writing system began to be simplified by the scribes that were actually using it. And so eventually, the hieroglyphs become so simplified that they're an entirely different writing system. And that writing system is called ‘hieratic.’ And that writing system continues to be used especially for any just bureaucratic writing, any keeping track of things by the government type of writing or pay slips or anything like that. And it starts to even be more simplified, more simplified until there's a third writing system, and that's called ‘demotic.’ And that is invented, you know, after the time period that we're talking about in this exact episode. But I want to bring it up here because demotic is actually the writing system that's on the Rosetta Stone. 


    Charlie: Oh, I see. Cool.


    Ellie: Yeah. So the Rosetta Stone has Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic, and then ancient Greek, which is a writing system that we didn't forget how to translate. And so because the same text appears in three different languages, we were finally able to like crack the code of hieroglyphs. So that's, you know, why the Rosetta Stone was such like a incredible discovery is because now we can read hieroglyphs. So yes, hieroglyphs would have been sort of written on like the walls of temples or the pyramids or whatever, and then just everyday writing by scribes would have been in heretic. 


    Charlie: And what sorts of things can we learn from–, you know, now that we've translated hieroglyphs and demotic, what sorts of things have we learned about daily life from these writings? 


    Ellie: So Egyptian life was very hierarchical. There was like a slave class at the bottom and then there were merchants and soldiers and priests. And then at the very top was the Pharaoh. But what's interesting and different for Mesopotamian society is that in Mesopotamian society where you were born was where you stayed, but there was some amount of social mobility in Egyptian society. You could be born a slave, educate yourself, and maybe like become a merchant or something. 


    Charlie: Okay


    Ellie: But the Pharaoh at the top was a god. And again, that's a bit in contrast to Mesopotamia, for example, where the gods gave the Mesopotamian kings the right to rule, like they were granted this right. But in Egypt, it was viewed as the Pharaoh is the divine representation of the gods on the earth. So the Pharaoh himself is divine. 


    So in terms of Egyptian religion, there are many gods and these gods are possibly familiar to you if you were obsessed with mythology as a child. I feel like their names are quite familiar, like ‘Ra,’ ‘Isis,’ ‘Osiris.’ And so when you die, your thing that's very comparable to maybe the concept of a soul, which is your ‘Ka,’ has potential to keep living. So Osiris weighs your heart. If your heart is lighter than the feather of truth, which means that you didn't do a lot of terrible things to make it heavy, then it gets to keep on living. If it's heavy, then your heart just gets eaten and then you're actually dead. So that's a bummer. 


    Charlie: Bummer for you.


    Ellie: Big bummer yeah. So if your Ka gets to keep on living, then it still needs access to your body. That's something that's interesting and it's not unique to Egyptian religion. Lots of religions feel like this, but it's just very particularly held where the preservation of your body is very important in order to house your soul. And so they develop very sophisticated ways of preserving bodies such that, of course, some of their bodies are still preserved to this day.


    Charlie: Right. Interesting. Yeah. I don't think I ever learned about the origin of like the religious origin of like why mummification became a practice. 


    Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. And then of course they began to build more and more elaborate temples and tombs to hold their bodies or to hold the pharaoh's bodies. Let's be clear that this was not like random merchant did not get this treatment. And so of course that's where you get pyramids. 


    The very first pyramid is in 2670 BCE. So right exactly at the same time that they're building pyramids in Peru. And I know it's actually just mind blowing. 


    Charlie: Yeah. We got to continue. 


    Ellie: Exactly. Exactly. But then what's also interesting is that like it's actually only a few hundred years that they're building pyramids. They're so deep in our imagination that it feels like ancient Egypt is just like nothing but pyramids forever, but really it's kind of this short window. We don't fully understand how they were built. The more you look at how they're built, the more astounding they are. Just the feats of engineering that they are just become more baffling. The more you understand about them, that's one thing I'll say. And nobody really fully understands how they did it. There's many, many theories. 


    One thing I do want to say, I just want to address really fast as the concept of whether or not they were built by slaves. What is definitely true is over the course of human history and over the course of human geography, every imaginable variation on forced labor has occurred. So we think of the word ‘slavery’ as meaning something very specific. 


    Charlie: Yeah. 


    Ellie: In fact, over the course of time, there's been lots of situations where somebody might be forced to work, but then they're paid for it, for example, or they might be viewed as being owned by somebody else, but they have a lot of power in the society anyway. So what seems to be true is that the people who built the pyramids were not viewed as being owned by anybody. There wasn't a concept of ownership and they probably were paid. However, it also seems likely that the pharaoh's people went out into the countryside and gathered the young strong men or the artisans who were good at working with stone or the greatest engineers and were like, You have to come work for me and the work will be quite dangerous. The end, you don't get a vote. 


    Charlie: Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying. 


    Ellie: Yeah, so just our very concrete binary version of who's enslaved and who's not enslaved is like not necessarily that helpful at various points in history. So I don't think that the pyramids were probably built by people who were owned by anybody. And there were lots of people who were literally enslaved in Egypt, and they don't seem to be the people who are building the pyramids. However, I don't think that you got a lot of option or a lot of job choice and whether or not you wanted to build pyramids for the pharaohs. And surely the countries just starved to pay for these projects. I mean, they're just unimaginably big. 


    Charlie: Yeah. 


    Ellie: However, the really gigantic pyramids, that was of only a very short amount of time. But then there's like 300 miles along the Nile of much smaller pyramids that go on for the next several hundred years. But then basically by somewhere between 2200 BCE and 2300 BCE pyramids kind of fade. So it's really only this period of a few hundred years that we think of as dominating ancient Egypt. But Cleopatra, who is contemporary with Jesus, so she's year zero. 


    Charlie: But a queen of Egypt. 


    Ellie: Yeah, but a queen of ancient Egypt and iconically ancient Egypt is, you know, closer to us than she is to the time when they were building the pyramids. So it's just–, we think we like to think of ancient Egypt as being one event, but it was in fact, you know, 3000 years long. 


    Charlie: Yeah. Cool. Is that a wrap on Egypt? Should we move on from here? 


    Ellie Yeah, I think that will be a wrap on Egypt just because we're going to keep coming back to it. So we're going to talk about some of the other civilizations that lived along it, especially the Nubians who lived right south. And it's just going to keep coming up. I mean, Egypt is still clearly very historically and politically relevant this day, but certainly, you know, for the next while. So at this moment, we're just going to kind of shelve it and we'll come back to it in future episodes.


    Indus Valley River Civ


    Charlie: So so far, we've talked about Mesopotamia and Peru and Egypt. Where do we head to next?


    Ellie: So next, we're going to head to the Indus Valley or the Harappan civilization, which turns out to be my favorite ancient civilization, which, which isn't a category of favorite I ever expected to have.


    Charlie: Nice, nice. Especially nerdy at this point. 


    Ellie: Exactly, exactly. So both Mesopotamia and Egypt mention another great civilization to their east. 


    And so where is this civilization? It covers this huge, huge space, 800,000 square kilometers, and it's spread across modern–, the modern countries of Pakistan and Northern India, all along the Indus River and several other rivers that are right there. So they're flowing down from the Himalayas out to the Arabian sea. And in that huge, huge space are thousands of small settlements and villages, and then a sprinkling of gigantic cities. What's interesting is that these cities can be hundreds of kilometers apart from each other. And again, these small settlements can be quite tiny, but spread across this whole space is like a very, very consistent culture – like archaeological package. 


    Charlie: What do you mean by that? Like what's consistent throughout?


    Ellie: The first thing to say about that is how do we know what we know about the Indus Valley? Because something that's so interesting about it is that it does have writing, but we can't read it. There's nothing like the Rosetta Stone. 


    Charlie: Oh, interesting. 


    Ellie: Yeah, it's really interesting. And so everything we know about their culture, we've learned through archaeology with a couple exceptions, because again, the people of Mesopotamia and the Egyptians talk about them. So we have like a little bit of secondhand writing about them, but their own writing we can't read. So that's like a really big bummer, I think. 


    Charlie: So the Norte Chico doesn't have writing, so we don't have that issue, but here we do have writing and we just can't translate it. 


    Ellie: No Rosetta Stone. 


    Charlie: That's crazy. Okay. 


    Ellie: Yeah. So I hope AI cracks that for us or something. 


    Charlie: Yeah, seriously. 


    Ellie: So back to your question of what does it mean to say that there's a consistent culture, what have we learned from archaeology? And so the most obvious way you can see it is through their urban planning. And so their cities all seem to follow similar plans in these really remarkable ways. They are again made of mud brick buildings like so many of these other ones, but they have like gridded streets and the houses are all oriented to let air flow through them in the right–, you know the most efficient way. And each of their bricks is made with the same exact ratio. And so –


    Charlie: What? 


    Ellie: Yeah. So there's like a one to two to four ratio. That's just all over all of their villages and cities. So there's one size of brick in that ratio that they use to make their houses. There's a different size, but the same ratio brick that they use to make their bigger buildings, the rooms and their houses follow that ratio. 


    Charlie: What? That’s so cool! 


    Ellie: It's just so cool. It's so cool. And then again, across this 800,000 square kilometer space, they have completely standard weights and measurements, some of which are still being used in parts of India today. And then one thing that makes them really unique is that they have covered drainage, you know, out of your house flows the water, goes down the two sides of the streets in covered drains, and then goes into an underground pipe that carries the dirty water out of the city. So again, we're like 2000 BCE and they have, 


    Charlie: They've got underground plumbing. 


    Ellie: Yeah. It's really crazy. 


    Charlie: This place is appealing very much to my Virgo brain. 


    Ellie: This place is so appealing. And so the underground plumbing hints at one of the reasons why they're really so striking and amazing. And that is that these drainage systems exist even in the kind of poor sections of town. Okay. And so what's really unique about the Indus is that there's like a shocking amount of evidence that there isn't terrible structural inequality.


    Charlie: What sort of evidence would we see of the equality is–, I guess you just mentioned there's plumbing in in all different neighborhoods, but you know, what other evidence would there be of that?


    Ellie: There are sort of wealthier, what appear to be like wealthier neighborhoods and less wealthy neighborhoods, but there's attention paid to public health in both. And another big example of that is in their diets. And so this ecosystem largely has rivers that flood twice a year. That creates essentially six seasons with two growing seasons in it. And that allows an agricultural package of like barley, wheat, oats, lentils, millet, sesame seeds, melons, grapes, dates, like this whole kind of agricultural package that makes sense in that part of the world. And what's so interesting is that when we excavate skeletons from different neighborhoods of these big cities, there does not seem to be evidence that they were eating remarkably different diets, dependent on how wealthy they are. And that is very different than the cities of Mesopotamia or the cities of Egypt or something where if you were rich, you ate well, and if you were poor, you had all these problems with your body because you were eating poorly. 


    Charlie: And that's a throwback to episode one, when we were talking about the copper age and some of the more egalitarian societies there, Catalhoyuk, for example, you said specifically that we were finding almost all the skeletons are doing the same labor and have the same nutritional, seem to have the same nutrition throughout their life. Or a balance of it. 


    Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's pretty wild. And then one last thing is that one of the most famous artifacts that you find all over the Harappan civilization are these small square seals that you can think of almost like a stamp. And they usually have an animal engraved on them. The animal is frequently a unicorn because this is just the coolest society ever. 


    Charlie: Nice, yeah what?


    Ellie: And then at the top is writing, which again, we can't read, but their guess is that they're almost like your signature or like a receipt. So if we're having some kind of exchange of goods, then we stamp something or other to show that like, I agreed to it and you agreed to it or whatever. This is like your signature. 


    Charlie: Yeah. Signature, sure. 


    Ellie: And those stamps are found in the small villages in the same way they're found in the big cities. They're found in all types of people's homes. And so it doesn't seem to be that there's like this elite class that rules the commerce and everyone else is subject to them. Like there just seems to be like a fair amount of equality. And the most shocking thing is we can't figure out how they governed themselves. 


    Charlie: Right. Right. That was going to be my next question. 


    Ellie: Yeah. So there's literally like standardized weight systems and standardize how to make your bricks, but there doesn't seem to be palaces or other evidence of a rigid government being like this is how much a kilogram is, you know. So we don't know. There are small buildings that seem like they could be gathering spaces. And so there's much, much speculation about kind of community meetings, but like we really don't know. We can't read their writing. 


    Charlie: Crazy. 


    Ellie: Yeah, it's really wild. 


    Charlie: If anyone's listening, can you please learn how to read their writing so that we can live in a better world today? 


    Ellie: For real. For real. And there's, there isn't, you know, there aren't, there doesn't seem to be examples of like massive monumental architecture, like pyramids or temples. Instead there's things like Mohenjo-Daro, which is one of the big, the biggest cities is built on a flood platform, which is so massive that they calculate that it took like 4 million days of labor to build. 


    Charlie: What do you mean? What is the, like the platform made out of wood or–? 


    Ellie: No, no, no of dirt. Like it's just like built up and some of the smaller villages and towns, you know, the smaller settlements are built on these platforms as well. So there's clearly just so much collective labor, so much working together, so much, you know, regulation and standardization and rich, rich culture without the evidence of like a top-down government. It's just impossible to like get our heads around. And I've linked you to like a couple archaeologists talking about it, and especially like, you know, they dig up this little, this little figurine at one point and they call it a ‘priest king.’ And there's like no evidence at all that it's either a priest or a king. And this, this interview with this archaeologist is kind of talking about how like desperate our need is to make sense of this complex society by putting the concept of a ‘priest and a king in it, even though like there actually is no evidence that that's what was going on. 


    Charlie: Interesting


    Ellie: So yeah, it's really, really unique and interesting. We have like so much more to learn from it. And just the last thing I want to say is that they sort of had their golden age and it began to decline around 1900 BCE, and we don't really know what happened to them. This is like a very kind of controversial topic. But at some point, a group of nomadic people from further north came down, but it doesn't seem to have been an invasion. It doesn't seem to have been the cause of the collapse of the Harappan civilization. It seems to have kind of been a coincidence. And there was definitely extreme climate change at various points. But basically there was just this unbelievably cool civilization and it kind of seemed to vanish for reasons that we don't understand around 1900. And they, the people that live there are not, exclusively anyway, the ancestors of the people who live there now. So maybe they left, we don't know. 


    China 


    Charlie: What is our final, our fifth cradle?


    Ellie: Okay, so our fifth one is one we will definitely be returning to in many, many future episodes, and that's China. So in China are two great rivers, two huge rivers run across China. In northern China is the Yellow River and the Yellow River is wildly unpredictable. It's frequently referred to as China's sorrow because it will jump its banks and flood and kill many people. And so the Yellow River is called the “Yellow River” because it holds so much silt in its water that it actually looks yellow. The water looks yellow from all the silt. And as the silt flows down, it builds up in different places on the riverbed and over time changes the floor of the riverbed. And that's what causes the water to suddenly jump its banks and flow a different way. 


    Charlie: I see. Yeah, that makes sense.


    Ellie: Yeah, if you imagine like water rushing down with a bunch of sand in it or something, it's going to keep altering its course over time.


    Voiceover Silt:

    Charlie: Silt is one of those words that's still bouncing around in my head from grade school when I first learned about civilizations. So what is it and why does it help with fertility? It's actually just a classification of soil like sand or clay, and it's created when rocks are eroded into tiny round particles by water or ice, resulting in a fine flower like texture that is easily churned up from the riverbed by turbulent water and rain. If you want to make very fertile soil for a variety of field crops, mixing silt with coarse sand and super fine clay gives that Goldilocks texture called ‘loam,’ not too dense for roots to thrive like pure clay and not too loose that water just drains away like pure sand. In addition, organic nutrients from microbes, plants, and animals abound in healthy rivers and are also carried by the floods and deposited into this nicely textured soil. Once ancient humans figured out how to control this process through irrigation, they had the perfect technique for watering and fertilizing their fields on demand.


    Ellie: Along the Yellow River were societies that began to become more and more complex. They began to get more of their calories from farming and they had incredibly beautiful pottery. Eventually, they began to produce silk, which is crucial to Chinese history for the next 5,000 years. They were trading with people that were farther away, et cetera. Over the course of Chinese history, this time period has become a semi-mythical time period that is given the honor of explaining early Chinese history, like of sort of establishing the pattern of Chinese history that then continues to repeat. So if you picture the way people in the United States sort of hold up the founding fathers in this good-old-days way, like “this is the time when the leaders of our nation cared about their people and they were honorable and they behaved honorably.” This period in Chinese history is a little bit like that. 


    Charlie: Ok.


    Ellie: And because it's so far back, you know, we're talking 5,000 years ago, it holds the semi-mythical place. And this is, you know, much like is true in Egypt or Mesopotamia, where there's a lot of like, this king then ruled for 3,000 years or something, you know, this time in Chinese history has a lot of magic in it. 


    Charlie: Sure. Mythology that kind of serves a purpose. 


    Ellie: Mythology that serves a purpose. That's exactly right. So there's this great quote from actually like a Roman scholar who he's–, when he's talking about early history, he says, "These things never happened, but they always are." 


    Charlie: right. 


    Ellie: And it just kind of goes to show that even if you're talking about something mythological, you're still talking about what people were actually thinking about, you know, it's like Freud saying, "Look at people's art if you want to know what they're thinking." And so this time period is incredibly important to Chinese history, even if the sources that we have say things like the yellow emperor ruled for 100 years, and like probably that isn't precisely what happened. 


    So there were these three early emperors, which may or may not ever existed. The third is the “Yellow Emperor,” and he's credited with like inventing musical instruments and figuring out how to produce silk, etc. So surely that didn't actually happen from one person. But the point is around this time, people became better and better at medicine, they became better and better at agriculture, they, you know, learned how to make silk, etc. He's then succeeded by several other people, the five emperors who have different names, depending on what source you look at. Again, in terms of the good-old-day's myth, one of the things that's interesting about this period is a lot of these people pass their leadership down to somebody other than their son. And that that's commented on. And so what that means is that the concept of a dynasty already exists. However, these noble leaders understand that their son may not be the best person to rule and find the best person, so that makes them unique. 


    Eventually, this man, Yu the Engineer, or, Yu the Great, ends up in charge. And he has been tasked with controlling the Yellow River, controlling these floods. And so he's Yu the engineer again, he goes up and down the river, works, works, works, he's sort of famous for only seeing his child three times in his whole life because he would just pass by his house while he was working so hard on this, on this enormous project of controlling the Yellow River. But then he somehow creates systems to control the floods and becomes the first emperor of what's now known as the Xia Dynasty. 


    Charlie: Okay. 


    Ellie: This dynasty is credited as being the first dynasty of dynastic China, which then continues until 1900, you know, 1910.  


    Charlie: That brings up just like maybe a really simple question, but I actually like don't know what a dynasty mean. Like what does ‘dynasty’ mean? 


    Ellie: Yeah, that's a great question. So the way that Chinese history and the most simplistic terms unfolds for the next four thousand years is just emperor rules. He dies and the power goes to his son. He dies and the power goes to his son, that family is blessed with what's called the ‘Mandate from Heaven.’ So God blesses this family's power, you know, and approves of this family's power. Then over time, as this power goes from father to son, father to son, the family inevitably becomes corrupted by this power. And they stop caring about the people and they just become corrupt. And then they lose the Mandate from Heaven. And this is usually indicated by some type of natural disaster: so the Yellow River floods, for example, or there's a terrible earthquake or maybe somebody invades. And that's evidence that this family has lost the Mandate from Heaven. And then usually somebody comes in and conquers and then their family rules. And so as the different families rule, those are the dynasties. 


    Charlie: I see. I see. Okay. 


    Ellie: So we are going to leave China in this semi-mythical Xia dynasty, which establishes the pattern for future dynasties of China when we move into time periods that are more concretely established in written language and in archaeology. We're going to just look at this time with its semi-myth and semi-history as just exactly what it is, which is a story that explains something that's very real and the exact details maybe aren't what's crucial.


    Civilization 


    Charlie: So as we wrap up episode two here, I just have one sort of remaining question which pertains to the word or like the idea ‘civilization,’ –


    Ellie: Mhm


    Charlie: – which I know we've been talking a lot about, but I'm kind of just curious like what is the original definition that you gave, if you could remind me? And then, sort of, what does ‘civilization’ mean now that we have all these different examples to kind of talk from? Examples –


    Ellie: Exceptions 


    Charlie: – to kind of talk from. Yeah, ‘exceptions’ and examples to refer to. 


    Ellie: I mean, one answer is I have no idea what it means, you know, but we'll come back to that in a second. But yeah, so in episode one, the list that we gave, which is like, again, exists in slight variations everywhere you look, is that a civilization has: cities, it has well-organized governments, complex religions, specialization of labor, distinct social classes, art and architecture, large public works, and then complex communication like writing. And yeah, as you said, there's so many exceptions to that. And very much how it feels to me is like you see what you're looking for or something. Like there's patterns that we expect to find because we looked at early places: mostly Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, and then sort of looked to see what they had in common with like modern gigantic societies and were like, that must be what a civilization is. And then sort of haven't adequately revised it as we've come up with like a million other examples of totally different ways of organizing complex society. And I mean, and that's not fair. Like plenty of archaeologists and historians do and are aggressively pushing back on those definitions. But yeah, it is a weird like what's in the eye of the beholder or something. 


    Charlie: Yeah, right. Right.


    Ellie: Why we talked about the craters of civilization in this episode is because of this shift that occurred. You know, we had the Neolithic revolution, people started to farm all over the world and it was kind of in varying degrees of relying on farming. And then roughly 5,000 years ago, a bunch of gigantic cities emerged around the world. And we're talking about that shift because we're still living with the effects of that shift. You know, those quote ‘civilizations,’ unquote, you know, took over larger and larger swaths of the world, either by actually conquering them, or just by other people seeing what they did and being like, “oh, cool wheels, like calendars, math,” you know, whatever they just kept borrowing from them. And so the shift that occurs couldn't, you know, can't be exaggerated how important it is. But at this time, the time period we covered in this episode, most of the people in the world are not living in these civilizations.


    Charlie: With that, we come to the end of our second call, in which we discussed the five cradles of civilization that emerged and flourished between 4000 and 1700 BCE. Their languages, monuments, art, social organizations, and math have profound impacts on our lives today. Next hour, we will pick up right there and keep an eye on all of these civilizations as their ideas of writing, government, and agriculture continue to spread. Episode 3 will cover from 1700 to 1200 BCE. We will see the rise of the Kerma civilization in Sudan, the heroic age of ancient Greece, the origins of modern Chinese characters, and the longest ocean voyage that humans had ever taken.


    Charlie: Bye Ellie!

    Ellie: Bye Charlie! 


    Credits 


    Charlie: World History 24 is written and researched by Ellie Koczela. I do the production and music. Our logo and design work is done by Alyssa Alarcón Santo. For links to any sources mentioned in the episode, as well as lots of fascinating extra material, visit worldhistory24.com. You can also find information there about how to support this podcast. That's worldhistory24.com. My name is Charlie Koczela and on behalf of myself and my sister, thank you for listening and we will see you next hour.

Alyssa Alarcon Santo https://www.alyssasantodesign.com
Previous

Hour 1 | 3,300,000 - 4000 BCE
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Hour 3 | 1700 - 1200 BCE